


The Girl Who Wouldn't Burn

by saltwaterselkie



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: 71st Hunger Games, 71st annual Hunger Games, BAMF Johanna Mason, Canon-Typical Violence, District 7, Explicit Language, Gen, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Mild Language, Most of the implied stuff is just in case it comes up because we all know the Capitol is awful, War, eventually, we're talking mostly just the f word bc Johanna's got a dirty mouth on her
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-07-19
Packaged: 2020-05-07 08:32:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19205716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltwaterselkie/pseuds/saltwaterselkie
Summary: Before Katniss, the girl who was on fire, came Johanna Mason, the girl who wouldn't burn. Short stories from Johanna's perspective -- after winning her Games, while she's a mentor and victor, during Catching Fire and Mockingjay, etc.





	1. The Victor of the 71st Hunger Games

              She’s won. She’s won and she can feel it in her bones, even though her arms still shake whenever she thinks about delivering that final blow. She’s used to cutting into trees, not tributes. But it doesn’t matter after all, because Johanna Mason is the first female victor from District Seven since the 42nd Hunger Games, and she’s sure she can handle a few recurring nightmares and horrid memories.

              Because she’s done it. The doctors look at her like she’s wrong in the head when she wakes up after being fixed – probably because as soon as she does, she starts laughing, a high, shrieking laugh that makes her sound insane. And she _doesn’t care_. Because they can all go fuck themselves; Johanna Mason made it out.

              She didn’t have much help from her mentors. Not a single sponsor for Johanna, not through the whole Games. She was the one who managed to score a 4 in training (remarkably low, so much so that she had to pretend to fall off of a ladder and almost cut herself with a sword in front of the gamemakers to garner it). She was the one who had hidden, whimpered, barely gotten away in all her encounters with fellow tributes and the arena’s dangers until the three Careers left had been just a little too cocky and left their pile of Cornucopia weapons to go chase after a girl from 5 who’d been driven into their sight by mutts.

              Johanna was the one who’d taken advantage, who’d grabbed the axes she knew so well and hidden in wait until the cannon had fired and they’d returned, uneasy tension between them because they knew the others would have to die.

              Like they’d almost forgotten about her, until one ax came whistling through the air and embedded itself in the chest of the girl from 4, and the boy from 2 hadn’t reacted fast enough to stop her next ax from hitting him directly in the stomach.

              And then it had been Johanna and the boy from 1, and she could feel the freedom of throwing off her cloak of helplessness (which had protected her for _so_ long in these never ending Games) and going at it. Because they were the last two.

              It was long and bloody.

              She won.

              She _won_.

              Johanna Mason, made whole again by medicine the lumberjacks in her district could never dream of, is a _victor_. And that means it’s all over.

              Her interview with Caesar Flickerman, afterward, is so distant from the first interview that she’s fairly sure half the audience doesn’t remember the girl in the tree costume who’d stuttered her way through questions about her home and her four brothers and then almost broken down because she would _never win_.

              The façade is gone now. Johanna is herself, acerbic and biting and taking no prisoners. They can’t do anything to her. She can joke about the stupidity of the sponsors who overlooked her and the tributes who underestimated her. She knows what she looks like; she can see herself in a screen hanging next to the stage.

              Johanna Mason, victor of the 71st annual Hunger Games, is _glowing_. Somehow, her stylist got something right today; she’s got a sleek dress barely resembling aspen bark wrapped around her body, one that shows off her strong logger’s arms and sharp cheekbones far better than the baggy pine-themed chariot outfit had.

              And Johanna feels invincible. She’s not the most attractive victor – nothing like Finnick Odair – but after a victory like _hers_ , something that no one has pulled off in years, if ever, Johanna knows people are reassessing her, reevaluating. She’s been done up nice and pretty for the victor’s interview. She’s not afraid to let loose and speak her mind to counter any incorrect notions these Capitol butterflies might be forming about the kind of person she is. The kind of _victor_ she is.

              She finishes her interview triumphantly, trying not to think of the living hell she’s just been through. It’s so much easier to focus on showing them up now, talking about how she tricked _all_ of them. And she did it on her own. She remains untamed, untamable, and somehow she feels that Caesar doesn’t quite know what to do with her, this girl who spent her seventeenth birthday scared witless in the arena.

              She’s still riding the high of the interview, still riding the high of survival (she can’t think of anything else or she’ll go crashing down so low nothing will pull her out) when they lead her to her room and let her be. She’s still in the tribute center. Still on Floor 7. But it’s so much quieter now.

              She’s barely shucked off her stupid high heels and flopped onto her bed when someone enters. No knocking; he’s just there.

              Finnick Odair.

              Johanna is on guard immediately. It’s something about that winning smile he’s got plastered on his face (she’s sure it’s not real, though it’s damn convincing). He was a mentor this year, she remembers. She killed his tribute when it was just the last four. She glances around the room for a weapon. Perhaps he wants revenge, for some reason, and that’s why he’s come. She can’t think of another likely option.

              And then she realizes he’s wearing some sort of bark-patterned suit.

              “Johanna,” Finnick purrs, and she _hates_ him then, because she doesn’t understand until he starts to take his shirt off.

              She’s sure she sounds more shrill than she’s going for. “What the _fuck_ do you think you’re doing?”

              His smile doesn’t falter, but the pace at which he removes his garment slows. “I’m here for _you_ , Johanna,” he says, and she can hear something strange in his voice – almost tense, like _don’t you get it?_ “You’re the victor. I’m one of the winnings.”

              “Yeah, well, get the fuck out,” Johanna says, suddenly angry. There’s a reason for it, she knows, but she doesn’t want to analyze it until Mr. Striptease is out of her room. She feels very vulnerable, sitting on her bed, so she rises in her sock feet (even though it only serves to emphasize the good 10 inches he’s got on her) and stares at him like she’s unafraid. “I don’t want you for a prize.”

              Finnick pauses, but he listens. His smile fades, just slightly, like he’s stopped putting in the effort but a sexy smirk is his mouth's default position anyway. And he starts buttoning up his shirt.

              Suddenly Johanna realizes how very awkward this all is, when all she wants to do is sleep. Or maybe she doesn’t want to sleep, because even if she tries, every time she closes her eyes she sees that District 1 tribute’s skull cleaving. Just like splitting wood. But with more blood and brain and bone.

              He turns to go without another word, and Johanna pauses for a moment. “Wait. Does this normally happen?”

              Finnick doesn’t turn back. “The victors refusing? You’re the first.”

              And then he leaves, quickly, like what he’s said is something to run from.

              She realizes what uncomfortable thought she didn’t want to prod. If Finnick Odair was in her room, if he did this with _all_ the victors since he’d been crowned a few years back… there must have been a reason. She knows it with sudden clarity, what had nagged at her: someone must have let him in.

              Which means someone must have sent him.


	2. Saying No

            She learns the next morning, when she wakes with the sun. She’s slept without dreaming; she thinks it’s because her body is so damn _tired_ that her brain doesn’t have enough energy to torment her at night. It’s making up for it in the day. The replay of her Games was bad enough; she’d tried to tune it out, the huddle of her body in the snow cave she’d built for herself during the blizzard. It was strange, seeing them pull together these videos she was sure they’d never shown in the actual Games, because she was the least interesting tribute on screen until she got ahold of those axes.

              She tries to shake the thoughts of blood out of her head as she is escorted to a car. She never really paid attention to what happened to the victors afterward; she only knows where they’re going when they arrive. President Snow’s mansion.

              She’s led up to the room with him, and they let her inside and leave her alone with the President.

              She hates him on principle, not because he’s done anything personal to her – no more than any other tribute. But that’s soon to change.

              “Miss Mason,“ he says amiably, threading his fingers together over his chest, “I was surprised to hear that you’d refused Mr. Odair’s… _hospitality_ last night.”

              “Wasn’t in the mood,” Johanna says tersely. She doesn’t want to get into it. If Snow thinks she’d want to sleep with another victor right after getting out of the arena, he is dead wrong. Johanna doesn’t trust easily, and trust is absolutely required if she is ever, ever going to let someone get close enough to do what Finnick had wanted to do.

              “Well, you’ll need to be tonight,” Snow says, tone calm as ever, straightening some papers on his desk.

              “Be what?” She gets a sinking feeling in her chest, because she’s sure it won’t be good.

              He raises one snow white eyebrow. “In the mood, as you put it.”

              Johanna just stares at him. She hopes she looks confused instead of spitting mad. Actually, she’d go for spitting mad. “Why do you want me to sleep with _Finnick Odair_ so fucking bad _?_ ”

              The President tuts, and she takes it back, she really _does_ hate him, on more than principle. “I don’t want you to sleep with _him_ tonight,” Snow says. “You’re going to be sleeping with,” he lifts the piece of paper on his desk and reads off a name, not looking at her. “Jerroll Crewer. Apparently, he was quite taken with your interview last night and wants to be the first. Paid the price for it, too.”

              She gets what she’s saying, she really does, but she’s still holding onto some semblance of control. “I’m not going to fuck him,” she says airily. “I’m a victor. I don’t need the extra money, I’ll keep whatever I’m getting now.”

              Snow looks up at her and, after a beat, sets the paper down. “I don’t think you understand me, Miss Mason,” he says, leaning across his desk and setting his chin on his hands. She can just catch the scent of roses and… and blood on his breath. The blood sends her back to an ax through a head for a moment before she brings herself back to the present. To where President Coriolanus Snow is saying, “you seem to believe you have a choice.”

              Johanna bristles at that. “I won the fucking Games. I’m a victor. Of _course_ I have a choice.”

              Snow frowns, but he doesn’t talk. Instead, he flicks his hand like he’s warding off a fly and a screen pops up from the wood beneath him. She can’t see where it comes from, but it doesn’t matter, because there is her father, splitting wood outside their home. He obviously doesn’t know he’s being watched.

              Johanna’s breath catches in her throat.

              “Now,” Snow says, “wouldn’t it be _unfortunate_ if anything were to happen to the Masons of District 7? And so _soon_ after their daughter was crowned.”

              “Jerroll Crewer?” Johanna hears the words coming out of her mouth. It doesn’t feel like her voice.

              Snow smiles, wide and satisfied, like he knows he’s got her pinned. Like he’s done this a thousand times before. Suddenly, Johanna thinks of Finnick Odair, and that smile, and she wonders if he came into this very room a fourteen-year-old, fresh out of the Games, to be told what she has been told.

              “You’ll receive the information needed for the appointment by this afternoon,” Snow says, that sickening smile still plastered on his face.

              Johanna goes through the day in a daze. She is in the bedroom with Jerroll Crewer, and he is starting to undress her from top to bottom, when she finally snaps out of it. This is not who she _is_. Johanna Mason did not win the Hunger Games for _this_.

              She focuses on Jerroll Crewer’s face and punches him in it. And then she’s out of the room, and her escorts are waiting outside but they’re confused, because they were told to be ready to wait for an hour or two. However long it took.

              _“I am not a fucking prostitute_ ,” Johanna mutters to herself, and she’s not sure if she’s more afraid or angry. She latches onto the latter as she gets back to the tribute center. There is no way, she thinks, that Snow will make good on his promise. It would be too suspicious, so soon after the Games has ended.

              She wakes up the next morning to the news that her father is dead.

              Snow calls her personally to tell her. “It was very tragic, Miss Mason,” he says. “Appointments must be kept. Crewer is disappointed, but he’ll be waiting when you return from your Victory Tour. You’re lucky he took the punch in stride.” And then his voice hardens, and he says, “don’t cross me again, Miss Mason.”

              Before she leaves, Finnick Odair somehow snags her into a hallway. They’re pressed up against each other, but he hasn’t made it sexual. She’s made him understand something, then.

              “Johanna,” he says, pain in his voice. “I saw the news. Whatever you didn’t do last night… you need to do it. Snow will do what he says he will do.”

              She looks up at him with clarity and she is a blade, sharp and unyielding. “You know,” she says, almost accusatory. “He’s done it to you. That’s why you’re always in the tabloids with this Gamemaker or that socialite.”

              Finnick shrugs, but she can see the sadness in his eyes. He’s not trying to hide it. He’s trying to scare her. “It happens to us all. I’m very popular.” He hesitates. “Sorry to say it, but you will be, too. There hasn’t been a female victor since the girl before me.”

              “I _won’t_.” She hisses the words. All anger, now. “I’d rather _die_.”

              Finnick looks at her, and this time it’s with despair. “But the ones you love, too, Johanna. The ones you love.”

              She pushes away from him and heads toward her train, thinking _Snow wouldn’t. He wouldn’t_.

              But she knows he will.


	3. The Aftermath of Choices

              She still can’t say yes, and it is because of this that Snow makes his mistake. Johanna thinks – _thinks_ , doesn’t _know_ , because she is still a girl-shaped bundle of pride and stubbornness and unpredictability, even to herself – that she would have caved if he’d killed two more family members. It would have been difficult, and she would barely have been able to live with herself, but she thinks she could’ve done it. Jerroll Crewer and whoever the hell else.

              But Snow doesn’t kill two of her family members next.

              He kills them all.

              Johanna stares at the screen in the train, disbelieving. She fought her way through this whole tour for 7, for the tight-lipped smiles that awaited her there. It was a difficult journey, what with the fact that she made no alliances with twenty of the tributes and personally murdered the other three, but Johanna’s tried to be gentle (as gentle as sandpaper can get) for the families. She knows what it’s like to see insincere Career victors pretending they cared, so she doesn’t. She’s straightforward, brutally honest, District 7 through and through.

              And she thinks it goes well. But the night she gets home, when she is ready to see her family and let her brothers dogpile on her and try to comfort her mother, she hears the news.

              It’s Pine who tells her. Pine, Johanna’s old teacher, whose words don’t quite make it into Johanna’s confused, screaming mind whole. “ _Fire_ ,” she hears, and “ _no survivors_.”

              Inside she hears Snow, making his threats and calling her _Miss Mason_ , and she realizes that he doesn’t just want her to do what he asks. He wants to break her, here in this very moment. He wants to strip off her bark, because he can see that at Johanna Mason’s core is a dangerous strength that he doesn’t like. He wants to see her burn.

              There are cameras on Johanna, whether they’re the obvious ones at the District 7 Justice Building or the ones she’s sure Snow has planted in her train and around her home, so she focuses on something else, through the pain, something that she knows will let her keep moving. She thinks of the fact that all four of her brothers, to the tutting of their mother and the encouragement of her father, would be egging her on now.

              Johanna flips off one of the cameras she can see with a gleaming smile, and she realizes something else. Exactly _why_ this is a mistake. Because Snow’s lost all his power at once. He can’t keep taking and taking anymore.

              She has nothing left to give.

              Johanna Mason, victor of District 7 and last survivor of the Mason clan at only seventeen years old, goes through the motions. The trees don’t seem so pretty anymore, and the sky not half so blue. She’s sure she’ll get over it, eventually. Hypothetically, humans are supposed to be able to survive the death of their loved ones.

              She wonders if they’re supposed to survive the knowing part, though. Knowing that she is responsible for six dying breaths. Not like in the arena, where it was kill or be killed. Here, she had a choice.

              And she chose herself.

              When she’s back in the Capitol, she tracks down Finnick Odair.

              “I saw the news,” Finnick says, tone subdued. He’s so good at reading people, at responding to what they want from him, and Johanna doesn’t _want_ that, she wants someone honest. Someone who understands, because even though they made different choices, and she’s _seen_ his family (dozens of extended relatives) alive and well in District 4, they were both offered the same deal.

              He took it, she didn’t. But he should understand.

              “Cut the bullshit,” Johanna says, “and take me to a drink.”

              Alcohol is heavily regulated in 7. Perhaps its something about keeping lumberjacks with axes from becoming drunk lumberjacks with axes. But Johanna has had a taste, and she knows what drink can do to you. She tells herself it’ll just be tonight. Drown the sorrows. Because she is _not_ going to be a Haymitch Abernathy. From now on, she thinks, her every action will be to spite Snow. That’s why she’ll keep living – not like the victor from the 62nd Hunger Games who slit her wrists in a Capitol bathtub last year. Johanna was so confused when she heard that, because what kind of a person living a victor’s lifestyle would ever want to give that up? She knows why, now.

              But she will live, and she will wait, because someday Snow will let down his guard and little _Miss Mason_ will be there, ready for her revenge.

              It’s a comforting thought. It disappears along with everything else as she drinks everything away, Finnick’s sympathetic eyes on her the whole time. Like he _cares_.

              She’s bewildered for a moment before she blacks out. She never really considered that Finnick Odair, of all people, might have the audacity to _care_ about someone. She supposes that him bending to Snow’s will in the first place is a testament to that, but it’s difficult for her to reconcile Finnick Odair, fourteen-year-old volunteer and youngest winner of the Hunger Games, with Finnick Odair, who sells his body to keep his soul.

              She always thought he looked so fake on the Capitol broadcasts. Such carefully constructed layers with no substance but a bloodthirsty Career hiding underneath. Now she thinks there might have been something else there all along.

              The night is a whirling, starlit thing that Johanna is sure would be beautiful if she wasn’t drunk off her ass, and she barely remembers that she lets Finnick Odair carry her home.


	4. Mentoring and Haymitching

Johanna mentors two years in a row of tributes who die long, gruesome deaths, two of them who survive just long enough for her to get her hopes up. She doesn’t fall into morphling addiction or alcoholism. Perhaps she’s too masochistic for it. Not that she doesn’t drink – she _does_ , of course she does – but it’s only at her worst moments. How else could she get through the way her last tribute this year was caught and killed?

Lamed by the sharp teeth of a bear trap gifted by rich sponsors who couldn’t care less about District 7’s Moss. Murdered slowly, torturously, by a boy from 2.

The Games end less than an hour after her tribute dies. Johanna buries her head in her hands, because she had thought Moss might have a chance. She really had. The girl was bright, and strong, and also remarkably ugly, which was almost as bad as a death sentence when it came to the Games. Johanna liked her spunk. Had liked her spunk.

She wonders if Snow might’ve played a part in the sponsorship of the particular gift that killed her tribute, and she shuts the possibility out of her mind.

It is later on the same night that Haymitch Abernathy approaches her. His tributes died this year as every year he’s mentored, his suggestions worse for their chances of survival than no advice at all. Johanna eyes Abernathy warily. She’s not sure what he wants, but she’s spent enough time in the Capitol by now, mentoring these stupid games as the only female tribute from District 7, that she knows to expect nothing but disappointment.

To her surprise, Abernathy leads her to a corner of the Capitol out of the gaze of the cameras, free of the microphones that plague Snow’s city. It’s an overhang underneath one of the bridges that carry silver bullet trains to and from the Capitol. Johanna goes with him only because Finnick told her once that Haymitch Abernathy was one of the four victors he trusted.

Johanna was confused at the time, but she didn’t show it. She smirked like she knew already and asked who else had made the list. Mags – of course – a name that brought to Johanna’s mind an old woman with wiry white hair and a thin-lipped smile that had graced her face on the news when Finnick Odair had won his Games. Annie Cresta’s name on Finnick’s lips was a prayer, and his eyes got that look in them that Johanna knew some Capitolites would pay their last penny for, if only it was directed at them.

And then he looked Johanna directly in the face and spoke her name, and Johanna realized in that moment that she was incredibly glad it wouldn’t be financially lucrative for President Snow to murder her best friend, because Johanna wasn’t quite sure what she would do if Snow threatened to do it.

She’s already made her reputation among the other victors as a _persona non grata_ if they want to stay in Snow’s favor, but she can feel the grudging respect they give her, too. Once, she’d seen Cashmere sweep past her on a Capitol man’s arm in a den of sex and drugs that Johanna had only visited to pull Finnick out of. She could’ve sworn Cashmere’s first reaction when she’d recognized Johanna, fully clothed and sober as hell, was to stare at her with unbridled jealousy.

Finnick was known to be one of Snow’s favorite victors – this Johanna learned quickly. He was biddable, charming, the perfect poster boy for the games. Johanna supposes it was Finnick’s reputation that gave him the leeway to befriend her. Probably. Whatever it was, she loves him for it.

And she demands his honesty as she gives him hers; Finnick knows not to speak to her with his sugary-sweet lover’s voice.

It is because Finnick trusts Abernathy and Finnick trusts her that Johanna finds herself trusting Abernathy, too – at least enough to hear his story of woe. He’s short and not-so-sweet when he describes his Games and the aftermath of them. She’s glad. She’s not one for sob stories, and she can tell that neither is he.

“My family’s dead, too,” Johanna says. “You know that, I’m sure.”

“Yes,” he admits, “I did my research. You’re the one Snow couldn’t convince.”

“He doesn’t know me.”

“He didn’t handle you right,” Abernathy says. “He should have dragged it out with your family.”

She’s silent. He takes the answer for what it is: acknowledgement of truth. And then he tells her about the rebellion.

There isn’t one, not yet. But the tinder is there. It’s in every rage-filled smile she gives the cameras when Catching Up With the Capitol does its intermittent victor interviews. It’s in the empty stomachs of District children. It’s in Haymitch’s eternally sour breath and the calm and cool way he speaks of war despite what he knows it will cost, because the alternative is far more unthinkable.

Unimaginable, really, that they’ve made it this far in a hell like this.

Johanna gives him a sardonic smile that she hopes hides how desperately she wants to believe him. How much she needs to know that she’ll get her chance to strike back at Snow. “I’m in.”

“Good,” says Haymitch (sometime in the conversation he has become Haymitch, and he will never be just Abernathy again), “because if you weren’t I’d throw you off this bridge and call it a suicide.”

She knows he is serious, and as odd as it sounds, it makes her feel better. Because she would murder and she would die, if only to kill Snow. Or, even though she hates to think it, she might let Snow live if only she could make him see everything he’s built crash flaming to the cold, hard ground. No matter the outcome for Johanna Mason, she wants him to hurt like he hurt her. “I’m sure Snow would be thrilled.”

Haymitch considers for a moment. “Nah. He likes you as an example. Like me, but younger – more recent. Proves that his cruelty and his ruthlessness are still fresh.”

She and Haymitch sit there on the bridge a moment longer, sizing each other up as they’ve each been doing from a distance since Johanna won her Games. The water rushing beneath them is cold and deadly, and for the briefest of instances Johanna thinks about how easy it would be to leap off and tumble headfirst into the peace of oblivion.

And then she remembers that doing anything of the sort would be awarding a victory to Snow, free of any effort on his part, and decides that if she dies, he’ll be the one to cause it. And she won’t go down without taking some major pieces of him with her.

“When do we start?” Johanna asks.

“We don’t,” Haymitch replies. “The Districts are close, but they’re not ready. Not yet. Tinder, remember. You of all people know fires don’t just start spontaneously.”

“We need a spark,” Johanna says. And then pauses. “Have you asked Finnick?”

“Finnick Odair? Good kid, but it’d take a little more convincing for me to trust him with this. Too much Snow’s pet.” Johanna doesn’t think about how disconcerting it is for Haymitch to call Finnick a kid. Instead, she thinks of Finnick’s eyes when he talks about Annie Cresta, who Johanna is already fond of by proxy, even though they’ve never met. She thinks that Finnick would do anything, _anything_ , to be free to live with Annie in a cottage by the sea.

“Trust him,” she says. “Trust him with this. Because of Annie.”

Haymitch looks at her, really looks at her, and nods.

The next week, when the post-Hunger-Games fervor has lessened somewhat and former victors aren’t being asked for their opinions on the newest one to join their ranks every three seconds, Finnick catches Johanna by the hand in the hall of the tribute center. She’s there only because Moss did a lovely portrait of Johanna with her deft, wonderful hands before she went into the arena; Johanna can’t decide if she wants to burn it or keep it forever, but she knows she needs to salvage it soon if she wants to have a choice in the matter at all.

“I talked to Haymitch,” Finnick says, a hint of his sugar voice there, but she knows its only for the immortal cameras. “He suggested an absolutely _fantastic_ cocktail. Never heard of anything like it. I heard you’d tried it already.”

She appreciates his metaphor – fitting, that all matters involving Haymitch Abernathy might somehow revolve around alcohol. “Of course I did, Odair,” she quips, “couldn’t let you get there first.” She feels vindicated, in some small way, that Haymitch trusted her to recruit Finnick. It is not a move, she thinks, that Haymitch will regret.

Johanna Mason finds the sketch, and the next morning she takes the train home to a lonely Victor’s Village and a District that finds her distasteful, if not an outright portent of doom and deceit. She goes out into the woods and finds a dead tree. She fells it. Its wood becomes a frame for the last gift she’ll ever get from Moss.

Johanna doesn’t hang it. She hides it in the cellar, facing towards the wall, hidden among preserves she still buys from the market, trying to spread her unwanted wealth to people too prideful to take it for nothing.

She decides that if she doesn’t burn it – though that’s still a possibility, because sometimes just looking at the back of it makes her want to chop through a thousand trees – she’ll hang it only when she’s done its creator’s memory justice. When she’s ruined the system that has destroyed so many innocents, fallen tributes and victors alike. When she’s ruined the man who keeps it that way.

Johanna Mason prepares to mentor in the next Games, and she considers the merits of gifting her next tributes quick and painless deaths, and she waits for the day the spark will come.


End file.
